fictionary… 8 megapixel artist… bloody awful poet.

Something

I don’t know what to write about today. It’s not like something doesn’t always come to me. Something always does. In words, and in life, something always comes to me. Once, for an entire year, I had writer’s block. Then poetry came to me. Once, for thirty years, I had security. Then clarity came to me. Once, for three-hundred days, give or take, I had darkness. And then came the sanity.

Something always comes to me.

A few months ago, on the advice of others, I began to journal. Besides that it sounds strange when you turn a noun into a verb like that, one thing the act of journaling taught me was that if you have feelings, you have thoughts. If you have thoughts, you have words. And if you have words, you have actions. And actions are the only way feelings become changes.

I’m a different person than the one who emerged from the three-hundred days of darkness that kicked off during NaBloPoMo 2016. Most people won’t know how different, if different at all. You would’ve needed to know me in the before, and I mean really know me, to see. And almost no one really knows me. But for those who don’t, maybe the only way is to read what I wrote a year ago November. I mean, you can… I won’t. I lived it, and that’s enough for me. I will say one thing about it, here. After I wrote it and bottled it all up in a saved file on my computer, I let it out again after the darkness had passed. I handed it to someone who really knows me.

And they are turning it into a book. A book that I’ll read, I hope, along with you. The book is called, “That Year I Died… and kept on living anyway”. It’ll be out early next year, because something always comes to me. Poetry. Clarity. Sanity.

I’m extremely glad to know you and also that you have found a place to expunge the dark feelings of the past. I look forward to early next year when I get the chance to read your new book, where your experiences and words are going to work for you, giving us a glimpse into what you were going through and how you wrote your way out of it. I guess this is why you will always have something to write about because as writers, we always use what we’ve got regardless of the circumstances behind it (whether they be glorious or tragic) and turn them into something cathartic and beautiful.